The Ho-Chunk and the Black Hawk War: The Rock River Before the City
Near Rockford, Illinois
Long before Germanicus Kent's canoe rounded the bend, the Rock River valley had been home to people who knew this water well. The Ho-Chunk nation, also called the Winnebago, had expanded into northern Illinois from Wisconsin by the seventeen forties, and for nearly a century the Rock River corridor was theirs. The Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Ojibwe nations also ranged through the region, and before any of them the Woodland mound-builders had left earthworks in the bluffs and bottomland across the upper Midwest.
In the eighteen twenties, American settlers began pressing north from Chicago into the Rock River country. The federal government had been signing treaties with Native nations across the region, acquiring land in exchange for annuities and assurances that were rarely honored. By eighteen thirty-two those pressures produced a war.
Black Hawk, a Sauk leader who disputed the legitimacy of the eighteen-oh-four treaty that had ceded his people's land, led a band of Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo back across the Mississippi that spring, intending to return to his people's village near the Rock River. The American government treated the crossing as an invasion. The Black Hawk War lasted several months, moving north through Illinois and into Wisconsin. It ended in August with the massacre at Bad Axe, where American soldiers and militia fired on a group of mostly women and children trying to cross the Mississippi.
That September, the Ho-Chunk ceded their lands south of the Wisconsin River to the United States. European-American settlement in what would become Rockford followed almost immediately. Kent, Blake, and Blake's enslaved servant Lewis Lemon arrived in eighteen thirty-four, two years after the war ended.
The rock ford that named the city, the shallow crossing in the river that made this site valuable, had been used for generations before any settler gave it a name.
